How to Remove EXIF Data From Your Photos

The field worth removing is GPS. Consumer receivers are accurate to roughly 4.9 m under open sky, so a geotagged photo posted publicly can identify a home to within a few metres, and the coordinates are written automatically without anyone choosing to include them.

What exactly is stored, and why the serial number matters as much as the location, is covered in the EXIF guide.

This removes location only. Camera model, exposure settings and timestamp still travel. For a completely stripped file, take a screenshot of the photo instead — a screenshot is a new image with no inherited metadata at all.

This is the one place where Android genuinely cannot be summarised in a sentence — what Google Photos will and will not do with location is a guide of its own. Google’s own documentation is explicit that “if a location was automatically added by your camera, you can’t update or remove the location in Google Photos” — so for the exact case this article is about, that app is not the answer. Samsung Gallery and several other manufacturer galleries do expose a per-share toggle. If yours does not, the reliable fallbacks are the same everywhere: share a screenshot, or run the file through a metadata tool before sending.

1. Step 1Right-click, PropertiesWorks on a multiple selection too, which is the fastest way to clean a folder.
2. Step 2Details tabScroll to the bottom to see GPS latitude and longitude, if present — what those numbers mean covers the format.
3. Step 3Remove Properties and Personal InformationThe link at the bottom of the dialog.
4. Step 4Choose copy or in-placeCreate a copy with all possible properties removed is the safe default — it leaves the original intact.

The export route is the one to prefer when sending files onward, because it produces a clean copy and leaves your library entry complete. Losing capture locations from a personal archive is irreversible and quietly ruins it years later.